How Tomas Gorny Went From $3 A Day To A $2.7 Billion AI Company

Plenty of founders describe themselves as self-made. Tomas Gorny’s version involves arriving in the United States with $200 and no English.

Born in communist Poland, Gorny moved to the U.S. in the 1990s to chase the American Dream. He says he lived on $3 a day after rent and transportation, working up to 100 hours a week cleaning carpets, washing dishes, and parking cars. He built a tech fortune, lost it in the dot-com crash, and started over.

Today he is CEO of Nextiva, an AI-powered customer experience company that was valued at $2.7 billion in its 2021 funding round.

Here is his story, and his read on where the industry goes next.

Building A Fortune From Scratch, Twice

Gorny’s fascination with computers started in the 1980s and led him to take the first chance he got to come to the U.S. He says his break came with an early web hosting startup he co-built while working nights and weekends at other jobs. Two years later, the company was acquired, and Gorny, then 22, was a millionaire.

Then came the mistakes. Instead of staying focused on building, he began prioritizing his net worth, spreading money across investments. When the dot-com bubble burst, he was nearly broke.

He took a step back and rebuilt. Drawing on what he had learned, he founded a series of companies, including a web hosting provider that was later acquired in a deal reportedly worth almost $1 billion.

In 2006, he founded Nextiva, now his primary venture and an early mover in AI customer experience.

Spotting Shifts Early

Gorny’s approach rests on reading technology shifts at their real pace rather than their advertised one.

In his view, innovation is cyclical. Once a new technology hits the market, he believes it takes five to seven years for behavior to change in a lasting way. During that period, companies swing between aggressive and conservative adoption, and many implement change just to keep up with competitors or satisfy investors.

Gorny’s approach is narrower: build products that meet actual customer demand. That focus has carried Nextiva through the arrival of smartphones, the move to cloud communications, and pandemic-era remote work. He approaches AI the same way, as something that has to produce value for the businesses using it.

Making Innovation Accessible

One of Nextiva’s stated missions is to help every business, regardless of size, operate like the largest enterprises. Gorny’s stated goal, as he puts it, is to “democratize access to innovation.”

While AI can seem ubiquitous, he believes many companies still lack the budget, infrastructure, and engineering access to use it well. That gap is where he aims Nextiva’s AI tools, including XBert, its AI receptionist. XBert connects to a business’s existing systems, keeps customer information in one place, and can handle a wide range of customer interactions on its own.

Nextiva now reports serving a client base of more than 100,000 businesses, and Gorny has no plans to slow down. The drive that first brought him across the Atlantic is still visible thirty years later.

Accepting a cross-industry entrepreneurship award at a major industry summit last October, he put it this way: “We see an agentic future for businesses, where humans define outcomes and AI helps achieve them.”

For a founder who started with $200, betting early has worked before.

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.